ABSTRACT
Film culture in the 1980s has been marked by volatile reconfigurations in the relations of ‘race’ and representation. Questions of cultural difference, identity and otherness-in a word, ethnicity-have been thrown into the foreground of contestation and debate by numerous shifts and developments. Within the British context, these trends have underpinned controversies around recent independent films like Handsworth Songs, My Beautiful Laundrette and The Passion of Remembrance-films which have elicited critical acclaim and angry polemic in roughly equal measure. The fragmented state of the nation depicted from a black British point of view in the films themselves contradicts (literally, speaks against) the remythification of the colonial past in mainstream movies such as Ghandi or A Passage to India; yet, the wave of popular films set in imperial India or Africa also acknowledge, in their own way, Britain’s postcolonial condition in so far as they speak to contemporary concerns. The competing versions of narrative, memory and history in this conjuncture might be read symptomatically as a state of affairs that speaks of-articulatesconflicting identities within the ‘imagined community’ of the nation.
